Our tea-drinking friends in the U.K. have recently discovered tea has a
very significant stress reducing quality. According to researchers from
the University College London, men
who drank black tea four times per day for six weeks had significantly
lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol as compared with a control
group. In the study of 75 men, half consumed either a
fruit-flavored caffeinated tea mixture made up of the usual
constituents of a cup of black tea, or, a caffeinated substitute
identical in taste but without the active tea ingredients. At the end
of the six weeks the men were given a series of stress inducing tests
to perform. Fifty minutes after the tests, cortisol levels had fallen
an average of 47 percent among the tea drinkers, compared to 27 percent
in the fake tea group.